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For the course project I am interested in exploring the discursive use of the term terrorism and its subsequent evolution. Terrorism as a term used to describe non-state political violence has demonstrated little consistency in definition spanning over various time periods, violent events, and language users since its normalization in American political discourse in the 1970's. At the same time, politicians' use of the term terrorism implicitly acts to normalize specific conceptualizations of politics and geopolitics as knowledge.

The following letter from the Associate Dean for Undergraduate Studies describes scholarship and other opportunities for undergraduate students. Please follow up at the URLs listed in the announcement if you are interested.

Dear Colleagues,

I am asking for your assistance in promoting opportunities to your undergraduates. The Office of Undergraduate Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activity (OUR) will:

Literature in Song dynasty (960CE-1279CE) in China is famous for its lyrics. And Song lyrics could be divided into two main schools: bold school and grace school. The two schools had different styles. The bold school were bold and unconstrained, and the grace school tended to use subtler and more concise words. But they share one common feature—excessive usage of images.

For our project, I wrote a detailed methodology covering parts of our project pertinent to the graphs that we're making. Are the actual analytical and conclusive parts normally interspersed with the data (graphs, charts, etc) in these types of projects, or do they have their own separate pages?

We're getting close! We made a lot of progress this week. All of our torture words now have a @synset attribute, the reading view transformation was completed, and graph development is underway. I (Emma) am in charge of a graph of percentages of torture words and pain words in each circle. Jessica is in charge of the graph that looks at richness (similar to the Ghost group's circle graph, I think). Nikki is continuing web development and Meghan is continuing WordNet stuff, which I think is almost done.

Gabi will be going to office hours to work on an issue with the schema. Whenever we have chapters it does not let us add plot points. She will also be continuing the work on publishing our circle graph, which will illustrate five different sections of the story, how many scary words are in each section, and the degree of scariness of that section of each story.
Gabi and Abby will be working on publishing the stories with corresponding links to each scary word. The links will lead to a table with the top 50 scary words for each story.

On Dec 5, 2016 the Hathi Trust released for free download a large set tagged data from English-language publications. See https://analytics.hathitrust.org/datasets for details. Note that the full dataset is 4 terabytes (that is, significantly larger than any drive you probably have access to), so read about selective downloads and don't just start downloading the entire collection unless you know that you have room for it.

In the markup department (Emma and Jessica), we managed to get quite a bit done. In fact, while it required heavy amounts of close reading, the text is nearly complete with markup in its entirety – a feat even we doubted we could achieve by the end of the semester! We have decided it will not be worthy of our time to continue this markup, since it is time-consuming and we must move on to other, more exciting aspects, including working on the website and analyzing the results with the help of WordNet.

Our team is heading into the final stretch of our project, and basically all remaining tasks have been assigned! We've finally come to a consensus on WordNet; we will be using it to explore the richness of the expression of spookiness (i.e. essentially dividing the amount of distinct synsets by the amount of spooky words). We also began looking into what type of graphic representations we're interested in using to display the results of our analysis.